What Gets Left Behind
by Lisa Telramor
Summary: In a world where Trisha was the alchemist, what changes and what does not is not as big a change as one would think.


_AN: For the comment fic community on LJ. Prompt: FMA (manga or Brotherhood preferred), Trisha is the alchemist instead of Hohenheim._

~O~O~O~

She'd promised she would find a way for them to live together. And despite all the years that had passed, Hohenheim had believed her. Trisha was brilliant and had a delicate touch with alchemy involving living things. Her plants grew better and healthier, aches and pains would be soothed away, and she had even found a way to help the body heal itself faster. She had hope of looking into alkhestry to help him.

What he liked most though, was seeing her teach alchemy to Edward and Alphonse. While Hohenheim did work around the home and farm, Trisha curled up on the front steps with Al in her lap and Ed at her side, drawing transmutation circles into the dirt. When Hohenheim watched her build ethereal dirt castles that could be blown over in a breath or caused a flower to bloom from a new formed bud, he couldn't help but remember how he had thought of alchemy as magic the first time he saw it. Trisha made impossible things—did impossible things—all just as beautiful as her. It made him regret that he'd never learned the art, though the dwarf in the flask had tried to tempt him into learning it. But even as Trisha made it magical again, he knew the horror it could cause only too well with each soul swirling within him. If he learned, would he use it for the simple beauty that Trisha did, to support life? Or would his inherent pessimism lead him down darker paths? He still didn't know alchemy, but it was a willful ignorance in the end; he didn't trust himself to use it unselfishly or kindly.

"You're ridiculous," Trisha told him once when he confessed this to her. "It doesn't matter how powerful you are or aren't, or what sort of alchemy you know, it's you that decides how to use it in the end. And you're not a bad person." She'd smiled, touched his cheek. "You know how to use a sickle and an axe; are you going to turn those on your neighbor? No. Trust yourself a bit more."

He thought she saw more in him than he ever had sometimes. And he had done unforgivable things before even if he regretted them. He'd never tell her any of them though because some part of him wanted her to keep thinking of him as a good person.

Ed and Al got older, but so did Trisha, and despite her tests and trials and research on a wide range of alchemy, Hohenheim wasn't aging with them. It made Trisha's wonderful meals taste like dust in his mouth and his feet itch to run from watching the effects of time trickling on.

"I need to go," he told her once, in the dead of night when Al and Ed wouldn't hear. "I…I can't…It's too much."

Trisha held his hand, tracing alchemical formulas onto his palm as she thought. "I can't help you with what I know here," she said finally. "If I went to Xing, perhaps I could try a different angle…" She shook her head. "It has been less than a decade. You knew it could take a while."

"I know." He rested his head on her chest where he could hear her heartbeat and confirm the life flowing through her. In her was a soul like the souls in him, but it was strong and bright and untainted by the agony inside him. "I know," he repeated. "It's…difficult."

"I can do this," Trisha murmured into his hair. She ran her hand along his neck and when she touched him, he always felt the possibility of alchemic reactions tingling through his veins. "I'll go to Xing and you can watch Ed and Al for a little while. This will work out."

He wanted to protest. He still didn't know how to act around children even after having two of them over the last four and a half years. He wanted to say that Ed got scared of him when he had his moments of introversion or that Al still cried if anyone other than Trisha put him to bed. Hohenheim didn't though. Instead, he let out a shaky breath. "Okay." Trisha's fingers curled through his hair, freeing it from the tie so it spilled over his shoulders. "Okay, but don't leave us for long. I'm not sure how long we can hold up without you."

Trisha chuckled, scratching his scalp until he finally relaxed into her. "Thankfully you have Pinako and her family to help you out just down the road if you have trouble."

"Pinako is going to think I ran you off."

"She knows full well that I put too much time and effort getting you to stay to be the one to run off," she teased.

"How long will you be away?" he asked, the teasing hitting a bit too close to painful thoughts.

"Not too long," Trisha mused. "Three months, maybe four if I have trouble. Do you think you can manage that long?"

With hands that shook far more than he wanted to admit, he pulled her in for a hug. "I'll make it work."

So Trisha left to study alkhestry and Hohenheim was left with two children that didn't seem to know what to make of him. He thought he had probably left a bit too much of the child rearing to Trisha in the end; he couldn't help it though since children had always been a bit mysterious to him even when he had been a child.

"You're a fool," Pinako said while they watched Ed and Al run circles in the back yard with Urey and Sara's daughter, Winry. "Stop focusing so much on the future and enjoy the time you have now." Her sharp gaze made him feel the same as it had decades ago when they first met—small and incredibly stupid. "Or was having children truly the last straw?"

No, it hadn't been Ed or Al, or even Trisha really that made it all too much. Or maybe more accurately, it had been all of them, all the people he had loved and lost adding up like pebbles on a paper drum until the weight finally tore it open.

He tried harder to connect with Ed and Al after that. Ed still gave him grumpy looks and told him—with bluntness that Hohenheim guessed all children must have—that he blamed Hohenheim for Trisha's absence, but the day Ed made a paper bird from alchemy and gave it to him was one of the brightest moments of Hohenheim's life.

Trisha wrote often. Hohenheim wrote back less often, but her letters held hope of progress, and his held shaky sketches of alchemical achievements and photos of Ed or Al if he could get them to hold still long enough. The sketches were getting better as time went on. He could almost replicate Ed's expression whenever milk was involved or Al playing with one of the farm cats.

Trisha returned and life continued as it had before her trip. Until one day it didn't.

Hohenheim found her sprawled on her alchemical notes. Illness, the doctors said. Illness she must have hidden for months and had been unable to heal. He didn't know if it had truly been illness or if Trisha hadn't shared everything about her miraculous alchemy that she should have.

He left Ed and Al with Pinako, fast asleep with tear tracks staining their cheeks after Trisha's funeral.

"I can't do it," he said, voice cracking. "I can't watch them grow old and die too."

"So you'll have them lose both their parents in the same week?" Pinako snapped.

"I wanted us to grow old together," he said.

"You're a coward and you're making a mistake." She didn't bother trying to stop him from walking away though. He thought he saw Ed in the upstairs bedroom window watching as he walked away, but when he looked again, no one was there. Leaving was something he would never quite forgive himself for, but he knew just as well that staying would have hurt worse. At the end of the day, the dwarf in the flask had pegged him rightly in that he would always put himself first.

~O~

Ed punched Hohenheim with his automail fist when they met again. "You bastard," he yelled, all hoarse and ragged like he had a habit of screaming his throat raw. "You absolute fucking bastard, I will kill you."

Hohenheim took the blow even though it broke his jaw. The pain was temporary after all, his body healing only seconds after, bone grinding against bone as red sparks of alchemy fused it back together. "Edward," Hohenheim said. He dodged the next blow, but only because it had been a fatal shot and he hated recovering from fatal wounds.

"Brother no!" a large suit of armor yelled. A very familiar suit of armor from Trisha's study that she'd bought because it 'reminded her of him' for some reason. Hohenheim felt his stomach turn as the armor clanged hollowly with his younger son's voice. Ed struggled and spat like a cat doused with water.

"You left! You fucking left us alone!" Ed's voice broke and Hohenheim ached inside.

He had no defense. He let Ed's anger and vitriol spill over him and bleed out until he was limp in Al's arms. Ed had grown. He looked like Hohenheim had at his age. Al had always had more of Trisha in his face. He didn't need to look in Al's armor to know that he wouldn't be seeing how his son's face had aged. Clearly he had no body at all.

What had he missed over the years? What mistakes had he failed to prevent?

When Ed had run out of energy, Hohenheim drew his sons into a hug that he knew he had no right to claim. Ed went tense as a violin string, but when Al let him go to hug back, he didn't try to get away.

"You _left_ us," Ed said one last time, voice small and broken like he was still the child Hohenheim remembered.

Hohenheim closed his eyes. Because there was nothing else to say, he said, "I know."

~O~

Ed and Al were every bit as brilliant as Trisha had been, maybe even more so. Their alchemy was as magical as hers had been, made more so with the lack of circles.

"We found Mom's notes," Al said once when Ed slept. "We know what she was trying to do."

"Was there ever any hope in it working?" Hohenheim asked.

"I don't know." Al watched Ed sleep with Hohenheim. Ed still sprawled like he did when he was three. It was unsettling to see metal limbs and scars sticking out from between the blankets instead of whole and hale limbs. "Maybe she could have done it. Maybe she would have lived a long life trying for it."

"I always wondered if it was the alchemy that killed her."

Al was silent a long time. "I don't think it was," he said finally. "I think she must have known she was sick but she didn't want anyone to worry. That was a lot more like her you know?"

Hohenheim smiled. It would be like Trisha to hide her health. "If you know what she was trying to do, you'd know what it is that I am," he said after a while lost in memories of Trisha pouring over research notes. They didn't hurt to think of as much as they used to. "You don't have to keep looking for a philosopher's stone."

"…Brother and I want to find a solution without using the stone," Al said.

"If I could turn back time—"

"You wouldn't change time even if you could," Al said. "You would probably do everything exactly the same."

If Hohenheim had left sooner, Al probably wouldn't have known him well enough to say that. Al had made him a cat out of scraps of tin and iron once long ago. He still had it in his bag along with the paper bird Ed had given him. He'd kept all the things they'd made for him over the years, hoarded like his memories. He'd never been good at showing his affection even though he'd treasured each moment his children showed theirs. "I'd have said goodbye," Hohenheim said. "To you two and to Trisha."

Al leaned his empty metal body against him with its hum of alchemy that tingled against his own alchemical body. He had failed to be a parent once. Maybe he would be able to make up for that in the future. Trisha was the alchemist, but even he could do something to help his children. Somehow.


End file.
